In the middle of a war defined by explosions, drone strikes, and artillery fire, there is something almost poetic about the idea of a cyberattack that makes the internet feel cleaner. That was the hopeful image President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered to the world on Monday, just days after Ukrainian military drones reportedly took out several Russian data centers tied to Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company. Speaking with visible optimism, Zelenskyy claimed that the operation had dealt a real blow to Moscow’s sprawling disinformation machinery. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms,” he said. “There was…

In the fog of modern warfare, data often becomes ammunition. When reports emerged of Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russian territory, the immediate focus was on physical damage—fuel depots, radar stations, and other infrastructure. But within hours, a different kind of battlefield began to take shape online. A chart circulated widely across social media, based on information from Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure company. The chart appeared to show a sharp drop in bot traffic associated with Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company, around the time of the reported strikes. To many observers, this looked like a smoking gun: the strikes…